Composer Etienne Charles’s Ambitious “Earth Tones” Takes On Climate Change

Jazz composer Etienne Charles’s projects use music to tell stories of cultures, peoples and history that are often overlooked by the U.S. mainstream. Now Charles, an associate professor of studio music and jazz at the Frost of School of Music, has tackled what may be the most important story of our time: climate change. 

Called “Earth Tones,” the project is an ambitious multimedia jazz performance that documents peoples and regions severely affected by climate change. From the Maldives Islands to Southern Louisiana and coastal Texas, “Earth Tones” uses original music, film, storytelling, interviews and images to show how people are confronting, and finding solutions, to the climate crisis.

The idea grew out of Charles’s musical travels in the Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America, immersing himself in regional music and culture. 

“My goal was to take people on my travels and let them hear the voices of the people I spoke to,” says Charles. “I’ve been seeing this for years. I’ve seen coasts get smaller, waters get higher, seen the damage hurricanes do. I see that it’s harder to do something. And I thought ‘how can I use my voice to amplify the voices that aren’t heard?’”

Charles worked with a half dozen filmmakers, videographers and editors to create “Earth Tones,” which was supported by a 2022 Creative Capital grant, a prestigious national award. Saxophonist and Frost associate professor of professional practice Marcus Strickland is one of the musicians, and the work includes an interview with celebrated Miami environmental artist Xavier Cortada, a professor at the University of Miami’s Department of Art and Art History. “Earth Tones” premieres in Houston this month, and plays in Omaha, Nebraska soon after, with more dates lined up for 2025.

Charles’s previous musical/cultural multimedia projects include “San Juan Hill,” which documented the vibrant music and culture of the Black and Latino immigrant New York neighborhood (the setting for the original “West Side Story”) that was demolished to build Lincoln Center, which was commissioned for the grand re-opening of the Center’s Geffen Hall in October, 2022. In “Carnival: The Sound of a People,” Charles showed the rich, dazzling music and culture of carnival in his native Trinidad and Tobago.

He’s been aware of the threat of climate change since he was a young boy in Trinidad. “Earth Tones” is also inspired by Charles’s mother, an urban planner, who worked on early efforts by small island nations to get big, industrialized countries to address the problem, well before there was widespread awareness of the issue.

But Charles was still shocked by what he saw working on “Earth Tones.” “It was mind blowing,” he says. “I went to the [Louisiana] bayou and saw all the storm surge and saltwater intrusion. This was an eight- to ten-foot-high indigenous burial ground, and now it’s less than a foot above water.”

In the tiny island of Rasdhoo in the Maldives, a chain of idyllic islands in South Asia that could disappear in the next few decades, Charles saw a beautiful beach edged by a coral reef that has shrunk by 90% in the last few years. “It’s gonna be gone,” he says. “One of the people I interviewed told me about the challenges of fishing there now, that their boats can’t go far enough to get to the fish because the water is too warm.”

Such dramatic changes are chilling. But, as Charles points out, the disastrous consequences of cimate change are everywhere, from floods in New York City subways to record-breaking forest fires in the Western United States. In Florida rising seas and more frequent hurricanes have sent insurance prices soaring, while more and heavier rainstorms and high tides regularly flood neighborhoods around Miami-Dade. Climate change threatens to widen the divisions between wealthy and developing countries, between communities with plenty of resources and those without. “There are disproportionate effects on Black and Brown communities,” says Charles. “Climate change in the Caribbean, especially for the small islands, is crucial.”

Ultimately, Charles hopes that “Earth Tones” will inspire people to take action. “Music is my platform,” he says. “This piece is to show people this issue is everywhere, and we feel the effects already. This is about solutions and people doing their part to build those solutions.”